PHOENIX — Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne told lawmakers Wednesday the state of public education is grim.
Horne made his blunt assessment before the Senate Education Committee and said, "Two-thirds of our students are not proficient in math. 60% are not proficient in reading. Imagine what that means for their future and our future."
Horne said it is his job to deliver a sense of urgency to schools and work with them to improve test scores.
The superintendent says work is underway to create what he calls 'improvement teams' made up of teachers and administrators to work with underachieving schools.
"If the help doesn't succeed," Horne told lawmakers, "then we have to hold them (the schools) accountable and that includes, in the final analysis, takeover of the districts."
Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia worries the superintendent's plan amounts to just teaching a standardized test. Not educating students on how to think and learn.
"Teaching to the test goes contrary to what public education is about," Garcia said. "We want them to understand the background on questions and literature and understand why math works and so this goes contrary to what public schools are created to do."
Horne told lawmakers he wants to bring discipline back to the classroom claiming there's "too much of a problem of administration not supporting teachers."
Horne said better discipline in the classroom will help improve test scores, "Students cannot learn in a class where other students are allowed to interfere with their learning and so this will be a major initiative of our Department of Education."
"To bring back traditional education to the schools so that students will have ordered classrooms to learn in and teachers will have a proper working environment," Horne added.
But educators say Horne's authoritarian approach doesn't work in today's world.
"When I hear the word discipline, I think of the old school corporal punishment," Beth Lewis of Save Our Schools said, "very top-down, authoritative style and that doesn't work for our kids. I think Mr. Horne should go out to schools and find out what's happening in classrooms and build from there instead of making assumptions."
Horne also called for either school resource officers or specially trained school security guards on every campus.
He called on lawmakers to raise the aggregate spending limits for schools so they can have access to $1.1 billion lawmakers dedicated to public education in the budget and he announced his office approved nearly 25,000 applications from parents seeking to receive money through Arizona's empowerment scholarship program to pay for their children's education.
That's more than what Horne's predecessor Kathy Hoffman granted in the first three months of the program.